Tech Layoffs, Lazy Leadership, and the Myth of "AI Efficiency"

Between May and July this year, OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS and Microsoft all put billions of dollars behind the same idea: engineers who sit inside the customer's business and build alongside the people who will use the software. The industry has a name for them, the forward deployed engineer, and a lot of Australian IT leaders are hearing it for the first time. Faith Rees has been running a consultancy on that model for more than a decade. Her view is that the role is not new at all. What has changed is that AI made writing code cheap, so the real constraint is now understanding what should be built. About the guest Faith Rees founded SixPivot in 2015 and runs it today. SixPivot builds software for startups, corporates and government, was ranked second in the AFR Most Innovative Companies 2025 technology list, and is a finalist for AI Initiative of the Year in the CRN Australia Channel Awards. Faith is also co-founder and CEO of Cloud Ctrl, a multi-cloud cost management platform, and she wrote the post that prompted this episode: "The Faster We Build Software, the More the Real Delivery Bottleneck Is Exposed." What this episode covers • What a forward deployed engineer actually is, and how the role differs from the vendor account engineer most IT leaders already know. • Why Faith calls the sudden rush of FDE announcements "rubbish", and why she says any company building software should always have worked this way. • How AI made the coding the easy part, and why teams that move faster without understanding the requirement just create problems faster. • Why the hyperscalers and AI labs are building their own FDE armies, and whether partners really lack the skills or are simply being hired away. • How SixPivot now hires developers, what fails a candidate, and the four camps of developer she sees in AI adoption. • The customer that burnt through a year's AI token budget of a million dollars in a month, and why Faith rates her own AI spend a six out of ten while her developers rate it a nine. • Why Faith would hate to be a developer today, and what developers and their leaders should do about it. • A confession about a pizza franchise ordering system that sent Friday night orders from northern New South Wales to Perth. Who this episode is for • CIOs, CTOs and IT directors being pitched forward deployed engineering by AWS, Microsoft or the AI labs, who want to know what they are actually buying. • Heads of engineering and delivery leaders working out how to structure teams when code is cheap and requirements are the constraint. • Consultancy, MSP and partner leaders whose customers are now being offered the same service direct from the vendor. • Developers and technical leads deciding which skills to build next.

SCX.ai listed a week before this recording, and on the morning of the record the Sydney Morning Herald ran a front page calling AI the most important sovereignty issue for Australians since the Second World War. At the same time Australian communities are pushing back hard on new hyperscale data centres, and Australian businesses are being told to adopt AI without being told where their data is being processed. This conversation sits directly on that fault line. About the guest

Episode overview AI adoption is the number one priority for Australian IT leaders, and that is exactly why the unglamorous work of replacing what no longer works keeps sliding down the list. Meanwhile the risk is growing, because AI is now finding and exploiting legacy weaknesses faster than any human team can. The Telstra outage on 8 July, traced to a defect the vendor had flagged since 2022, is what happens when technical debt is left at the bottom of the pile. About the hosts Jono Staff is CRO at ASE Group and Executive Director of WinDC, with more than 20 years in cloud infrastructure, managed services and critical infrastructure. Naran McClung leads Australia's leading Azure managed services practice as Executive, Azure at Macquarie Cloud Services, and thinks in cloud economics and AI. In this rant cast they go without a guest and pull apart the question the industry keeps ducking: why are we still so bad at replacing the old things that no longer work? What this episode covers • The Telstra outage on 8 July, traced back to a timekeeping software defect the vendor had warned about since 2022, and why that is a technical debt story rather than a one-off • Why 93% of organisations carry technical debt yet only 24% feel confident they can track it, and what that gap costs • How AI is changing the maths on legacy kit: the largest Patch Tuesday on record at 570 vulnerabilities, and end-of-life systems accruing 218 new vulnerabilities every six months • Whether AI is now the threat, the defence, or both, and why a runaway agent is a tooling failure rather than Skynet • Sovereignty and token economics: what happens when the frontier model you built on gets pulled or triples in price, and why sovereign is being redefined • Data centre scarcity in Australia, with 14 companies bidding on the last three megawatts of air-cooled capacity • The closing argument: make technical debt a board-issued KPI so it can never be quietly deprioritised again Why now Adapt's latest survey of more than 2,400 Australian CIOs and IT leaders puts AI adoption as the number one priority. The risk is that everything else slides down the list while the attack surface grows. AI is now finding and exploiting legacy weaknesses faster than any human team can, which turns years of deferred maintenance into a live liability rather than a someday problem. Who this episode is for • CIOs, IT directors and heads of infrastructure balancing an AI mandate against ageing estate • CISOs and security leaders watching vulnerability counts climb on end-of-life systems • Boards and executives deciding how to fund and measure risk they cannot see • MSP and cloud leaders advising customers on remediation, sovereignty and cost Leave your anonymous confession here: https://thingsreasons.show/confessions/ Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/things-reasons Follow Naran's Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/things-reasons-newsletter-7371660254704701440/ Follow Jono's Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/things-reasons-newsletter-7371662467678023680/ Instagram: @things.reasons

In February 2026, roughly 285 billion US dollars fell off software valuations in 48 hours, on the theory that AI would gut per-seat SaaS. NinjaOne sells per-seat SaaS and is growing about 70 percent a year.

The IT industry is shedding jobs to cost-cutting, AI restructuring and the usual business cycles, and the man who chairs the Australian Men's Shed Association thinks the real cost, what it does to people's identity and purpose, is the thing nobody is talking about honestly.